Newsgroups: soc.college
Subject: CODOH's paid advertisements: Harvard
Summary:
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Distribution: world
Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac
Keywords: CODOH,Harvard
Archive/File: orgs/american/codoh/university.response harvard.001
Last-Modified: 1993/10/24
_Holocaust_ Revisionism_: NO OBLIGATION TO PUBLISH LIES
Harvard Crimson, Dec 10, 1991
Opinion page, editorial
There is a movement growing on the fringes of American and European
politics. This movement politely calls itself the school of revisionist
Holocaust history (sounds academic doesn't it) setting up such innocuous-
sounding things as the Institute for Historical Review, _Holocaust News_,
the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Claiming to pursue
"historical truth", this small insidious group propagates myth after
mind-boggling myth: the Holocaust never happened, Anne Frank's _Diary_
is a forgery, far fewer than six million Jews died in Nazi custody, those
who did die were stricken by typhoid--not Zyklon B gas.
They then argue that the Holocaust is simply an ingenious Jewish
invention, designed to attract world sympathy, to oppress Germans and
Palestinians, or to further a Jewish conspiracy, or whatever comes to mind.
Holocaust 'revisionism' is not simply idiocy on an epic scale;
it's not like saying that the French Revolution never happened or that the
earth is flat. It is a blatant attempt to stir up anti-Semitism. These
monstrous lies are an insult to the memories of all who where murdered in
the camps--gays, Poles, gypsies and other social undesirables as well as
Jews--but they are aimed at Jews. Behind the bogus footnotes lies a
poorly disguised hatred.
Unsuprisingly, these Hitler apologists have recently focused their
propaganda efforts on college campuses, looking to deceive a new generation
that never saw the Third Reich first hand. This fall, college newspapers
across the country received a full-page adverstisements--looking suspiciously
like a full page advertisement explaing how the PC thought police was
preventing academic debate about the Holocaust's non-existence, how the
photographs, documents and eyewitness testimony proving the obvious in
fact prove nothing, how "Zionists and others in the Jewish community"
whose "purpose was to drum up world sympathy and political and financial
support for Jewish causes" had led "a conspiracy to suppress the truth."
The advertisement closed with an appeal for contribution to
the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. "Your contribution to
CODOH will be used to diseminate the good news of Holocaust Revisionism,"
it said.
Some college papers, including The Duke Chronical and the Michigan
Daily printed the ad. Others, including The Daily Pennsylvania and The
Crimson did not.
The Crimson has a longstanding policy of defending free speech,
even when the content is offsisve. Over the years, many controversial
arguments (date rape, homosexuality, Israel) have been made on these
pages. We have not always agreed with those argument, but most always
we have printed them.
At the same time, we are a private newspaper, and as such we
reserve the right to impose internal restrictions on what we will and
will not print. Content matters. By chosing not to run an ad, or an
editorial for that matter, we are not imposing censorship; we are
simply refusing to offer our privately-owned assets--our printing press,
our circulation network, our readership, our limited number of pages,
and the name of The Harvard Crimson, for that matter.
We don't reject many advertisements. Then we don't get offered
too many blatanly false ads from blatant anti-semites. (According to
the Anti-Defamation League, CODOH was co-founded by Bradley R. Smith,
the write of the ad, and by a known member of an American Neo-Nazi Party).
We're not talking about a controversial argument based on questionable
facts. We're talking about vicious propaganda based on utter bullshit that
has been discredited time and time again by legitimate scholars of
diverse ideological persuasions.
CODOH is free to pour their $700 in copying machines. They can
print up flyers and hawk around Harvard Square to their heart's content.
In fact, the Square is occasionaly grazed by Lyndon LaRouche supporters
distributing eye-opeing ideas about Jewish conspiracies, and we don't
do anything to stop them.
But we see no obligation to run CODOH's hateful nonsense beneath
the banner of the Harvard Crimson. We feel that providing CODOH a
forum to promulglate malicious falsehoods in the name of "open debate"
would represent an abdication of our editorial responsibility.
Ultimately, the problem with the ad, like the movement from
which it came, is not simply that it is moronic and false. CODOH's
rhetoric, unlike equally silly claims that two times two is six,
seeks to propagate hatred against Jews; that is why it has to put on
the moronic and false charade. We would no more run this ad then
we would run ad reading "Niggers die." Let Gnomon Copies [a copy store]
handle that one, thank you.
The fact that the ad we received chose to veil its message does
not make it any more appropriate for our printing press. Simply put:
We do not print just anything, and we do not intend to prostitute this
newspaper to "disseminate the good news" of lies and hatred. There
may be borderline cases for this rule, but his ad was not one of them.
=30=

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